When my car was broken into last month, I became by my estimate the 26,000th person in San Francisco to meet that fate this year — and that’s just the people who bothered to report the crime. People at every level of the socioeconomic ladder, in every corner of the city, have been affected by this crime epidemic. But, as I’ve learned over the past few weeks, city government is long on excuses and short on plans to solve the problem.

The number of auto burglaries has tripled since 2010, with no signs of slowing. In fact, there were 5,333 more car break-ins by the end of October 2017 than in the same period of 2016, according to Police Department crime statistics.

The Bay Area had the nation’s highest rate of car theft last year — and the problem is getting worse in San Francisco, statistics show.

The rate of auto thefts in the city rose 14 percent in 2014 and is up another 10 percent as of Sept. 1, police records show. If the trend continues, roughly 7,300 trucks, automobiles and motorcycles could be reported missing in 2015 — San Francisco’s highest count in nearly a decade and a more than 80 percent increase from the low point in 2010.

The increase bucks state and regional trends.

Per capita, Oakland ranked second in the nation for stolen vehicles in 2012. The numbers there have steadily dropped during the past few years and leveled off this month. Auto theft fell about 4 percent in California from 2013 to 2014, the most recent statewide figures available.

I tell the police we’re following a stolen van. This seems to get some attention at first, but after asking more questions and learning it’s a rental they start slow walking. We have a trainee on the phone and his supervisor is right there telling him what to do.

The supervisor gets a hold of the sergeant, and I can hear her asking for permission to disconnect. They want to end the call. And then I get a call on the other line. It’s the sergeant, I think. He never introduced himself.

I answer: “Hello?”
“THIS IS SFPD, WE ARE NOT GOING TO PURSUE YOUR VAN ALL OVER THE CITY”
It’s in caps because he was kinda yelling. I know there’s no point in arguing about this.
“OK I understand, thank you”
Click. He hangs up.

Here’s another story, which takes place frighteningly close to my home. A friend shared it with me and authorized me to share with you: [Read more…]

Today’s news could be called Sociopath News, thanks to scheming politicians and bureaucrats, scary athletes, sex-crazed illegal aliens, and more.

Officially, there’s no such thing as a “sociopath.” Sociopath is just lay person shorthand for someone with an antisocial personality disorder. So that we’re all on the same page here when I use the term sociopath, I’m relying on a definition I pulled off of WebMD:

Symptoms usually include antisocial behavior in which there is little concern for the rights of others such as indifference to the moral or legal standards of the region or community. Behavior patterns usually include excessive drinking, fighting and irresponsibility. A key to the disorder is long lasting, persistent, manipulative, exploitive actions and manners that determinedly ignore others.

There’s actually more to the definition, stuff about age of onset or proper diagnosis, but I’m skipping those parts. What I want to focus on in this round-up post are individuals or cultures that have “little concern for the rights of others,” are “indifferen[t] to the moral or legal standards of the region or community,” and who engage in “long lasting, persistent, manipulative, exploitive actions and manners that determinedly ignore others.” To the extent that don’t care about morals, their own physical or mental needs define the boundaries of their thoughts and conduct.

Athletes without conscience. I got stuck on the sociopath shtick yesterday when I was watching Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel. It’s pay TV, so I can’t put a video here, but I’ll tell you briefly about the segment that triggered my thoughts about sociopathy. If you follow baseball, which I don’t, this story is probably already familiar to you:

Matt Bush entered professional baseball at 18. He got a big salary and started drinking with abandon. He was arrested repeatedly for all sorts of awful drunken behavior, but always apologized, got little wet noodle slaps, and walked away.

In 2012, while driving drunk, Bush ran over motorcyclist Tony Tufano, crushing Tufano’s entire upper body, including his face. It’s a miracle that Tufano is alive. In seconds, he went from being an active, engaged 72-year old to becoming an overweight, drug dependent, pain-ridden, deeply depressed recluse. Bush, meanwhile, drove away from the scene of his crime, only to be caught later.

Bush was sent to prison, then to a halfway house, and then ended up on the Texas Rangers because his escapades had left his throwing arm unimpaired. The Rangers exert control over him: He can’t drink, he can’t drive, and he has to live with this father. Fair enough. I believe in remorse, repentance, and redemption.

Except that as I watched the Real Sports segment, it appeared to me that Bush’s remorse was limited to the damage he did to his own life. To the extent he repented, it was to be sorry that he’d screwed himself up. Redemption? Well, you don’t get there from where he seems to be. This certainly could have been a nasty hit job through HBO’s selective editing (the media has been known to do this), but Bush as framed didn’t show one iota of sorrow for Tufano.

One got the feeling that Bush believes Tufano was at fault for getting under the wheels of Bush’s car. To the extent Bush has cleaned up his act, Tufano served as a useful device for triggering that change, but at no point did Bush acknowledge Tufano’s pain and suffering, nor did he seem to feel under any moral obligation to Tufano. Bush was satisfied that, having read the Bible in prison, God had forgiven him, and everything else was past history.

To me, that’s pure sociopath.

But it turns out that Bush is, if you’ll pardon the pun, Bush-league when it comes to sociopaths and sports. Only when you read about Bruno Fernandes de Souza will you fully understand the sociopath athlete: